Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our Film was made to represent teenage, urban, working class boys and we tried to do this by making our film similar to Films like Kidulthood and Shifty. We aimed at doing this by creating a very urban setting. In our film we have shots of things such as tower blocks, an underpass, traffic, a lot of dirty walls and graffiti. We tried to represent our chosen social class by the costume that we chose. We decided that we would get the actors to wear hoodies, black & grey coloured clothing and flat peak caps. We think that this is the dominant representation of this particular group of people as it feeds the stereotype of teenage boys being intimidating and threatening. Another way that we tried to represent this particular social group was by the soundtrack used. We chose a beat from the Grime genre because we feel that it fits in with the setting and the characters. Grime is a music genre which is fast paced at around 140 beats per minute which originated from East London. As we are trying to create an urban feel to the film opening this sort of music fits in perfectly. Grime, is a cross-pollinated genre, taking influences from a variety of different cultural styles as well as musical ones, we took into account that a lot of people living in urban areas, such as the setting in our opening would be from ethnic minority groups. However ll of the characters in our film are white, this was because the area of Worcester where we live has mainly only white people available to us. This would therefore challenge the dominant representation of this sort of area and show an alternative representation of the sort of people that should be presented in this sort of setting. The font that we chose to use in our film was a formal, strong sort of font. We chose to use this font as we feel it again portrays the urban feel of order and a strict way of doing things. This could be linked to the laws and police presence surrounding these group of people. It is also important to remember that the people not involved in our film opening tell us as well. There are no girls shown, or no boys with long hair, this suggests that it is expected in this sort of setting for the boys to have short haircuts which could therefore connote the urban upbringing that they have had. At the end of the film opening the two boys go and meet another boy who is smoking. This could reinforce the dominant ideology as in the UK over 25% of teenage boys smoke on a regular basis and a high proportion of these are working class. For our titles in our film sequence we chose to have a regular however serious style which could be argued to represent this actuall social group in general. We chose to fade each credit out by distorting them as they go out to create the urban feeling therefore representing the working class teenage male. Overall I would say that we reinforced the dominant representation of teenage working class boys mainly through the costume that we made them wear and the setting that we put them in. We couldn't of put them in a rural setting or put them in expensive clothes with college briefcases as it wouldn't of fitted in with our specific genre and wouldn't hit our target audience which could therefore lead to a lack of demand, and a bad reputation for our film.